Chapter Twenty-Four #2
Chatterton was there, which was unsurprising; Chatterton was at every party of this size and type.
What was unsurprising in a different way was how precisely he positioned himself relative to Lydia, and how she received his attentions with the same composure and warmth she gave everyone, which Fitzwilliam was now experienced enough to recognise as neither encouragement nor discouragement but simply a surface, seamless and complete.
He was watching this from across the room, managing his own expression with the professional competence of a man who had conducted negotiations under fire, when a voice at his elbow said: “Colonel Fitzwilliam. How very pleasant to see you.”
Caroline Bingley stood beside him. She was elegant, composed, and wearing an expression of warm concern that sat on her face with the slight wrongness of something recently arranged.
They exchanged civilities. She asked about Canada with what appeared to be genuine interest. She did not mention Lydia, which was more noticeable than if she had.
“You will find London much altered since you were last here,” she said, after a moment.
“In some respects,” he agreed.
“Everyone has been most anxious about your safe return.” She paused. Her eyes moved, briefly and apparently without intention, toward Lydia and Chatterton. “Your wife has become a great favourite in fashionable society. She has made herself very agreeable to a great many people.”
“She has,” Fitzwilliam said evenly.
“Lord Chatterton in particular seems to find her company very diverting.” Another pause, laden with the specific gravity of a thing not said. “He is always so charming. One hears things, of course, about the company he chooses to keep. But I am sure there is nothing in it.”
She smiled at him and moved away to greet someone else.
He stood where he was for a moment and thought about what he had just heard and how much of it he believed, and how much of it he couldn’t quite bring himself to discard, and disliked himself for both.
What he had more time for, as the week went on, was Georgiana.
Anstruther had spoken to Darcy, who had responded with the cautious, considered warmth of a guardian who wanted to be sure.
He had said he would prefer Georgiana to have more time.
He had not said no. Anstruther had accepted this with a composure that had, by Darcy’s own account to Fitzwilliam one evening, impressed him more than any amount of passionate protest would have done.
Georgiana knew all of this, wanted Darcy’s blessing very much, and was managing the waiting with a maturity that was quietly remarkable in a girl of nineteen.
She talked to Lydia about it. Not to Darcy, who was the party in question, and not to Elizabeth, who would feel obliged to do something about it, and not to Fitzwilliam, who was family but relatively new.
She talked to Lydia, who listened, apparently, without offering advice or opinions or comfort in the conventional sense, and who was by all evidence exactly what Georgiana needed.
He had observed one such conversation from a sufficient distance not to overhear it: Georgiana talking with something unguarded in her face, Lydia sitting very still and listening with an expression of attention that he recognised, the same attention she had given him when he talked about the dawn light over the lake.
She gave that to Georgiana freely and without thinking about it. He had had to earn a fragment of it with a bear story.
He raised the subject with Lydia one afternoon, which began as an attempt at conversation and became something else.
He said he thought Darcy was being overcautious.
She said she thought Darcy was being careful, which was different, and that the distinction mattered to Georgiana whether Fitzwilliam appreciated it or not.
He said he appreciated it perfectly well.
She said she wasn’t certain he did. There was a pause in which they looked at each other with something that was not really irritation and was considerably more alive than anything they had managed since the night of the bear story.
“Anstruther is a good man,” he said.
“He is,” she agreed. “And Georgiana knows it. Which is precisely why she will wait as long as Darcy asks her to, and precisely why it costs her something to do it.” She looked at him. “She has been certain since May. That is five months of being certain and not being permitted to act on it.”
Something in the way she said it landed differently than she had perhaps intended, or perhaps exactly as she had intended; he was not yet skilled enough at reading her to know which.
He thought about five months of certainty and waiting, and about three years of uncertainty and waiting, and said nothing.
“Anstruther will be good for her,” Lydia said, more quietly. “He pays attention to what she actually says.”
“That is a considerable virtue,” Fitzwilliam said, after a moment.
She looked at him again, a brief direct look, and then the conversation moved on.
He caught himself thinking, afterward: that is what it could be like. The thought arrived clearly enough that he couldn’t pretend it hadn’t.
Two days later, James got into the garden.
The sequence of events, reconstructed afterward, appeared to involve James’s nurse turning her attention away for approximately thirty seconds, the garden door being discovered to be unlocked, and James forming and executing a plan of admirable single-mindedness that left him comprehensively muddy from the knees down and in possession of something that had probably once been a leaf.
Lydia was in the garden before anyone else had fully assessed the situation.
She crossed the lawn at a pace that was very nearly running, crouched down to James’s level with complete disregard for her dress, said something to him in a calm and serious tone, extracted the former leaf, and then carried him inside under one arm with the unhurried competence of someone who had done this, or something very like it, before.
James, for his part, did not seem to object.
Fitzwilliam, who had arrived at the garden door in time to see most of this, was trying very hard not to laugh.
He failed, eventually, when Lydia came back past him with James under her arm and caught his eye over the top of James’s head with an expression that said she knew perfectly well what she looked like and would require him to behave himself.
He watched the light in her eyes and thought: there she is.